Quotes

Cecil, Welcome to Night Vale:"The problem wasn’t solved, but most problems don’t get solved. I mean, generally we just do our best to mitigate the problem, and if it can’t be mitigated, then it can be relegated to a background noise by pleasant distractions and a prioritization of interests."

Dan Harmon:"I believe in magic. I believe in mythology. I believe in shamanism. I believe that spells can be cast and I believe that random things coalesce and reveal themselves to be part of a plan we don’t control, you know."

McAlvie"The ultimate downfall of modern civilization won't be war; it'll be Twitter and Facebook."

Jenny Zhang:"A lot of writers swear by routine, but I swear by chaos. There’s enough fucking routine in my life. Every day I have to brush my teeth. Every day I have to smile at strangers. Every day I have to worry about money. Every day I want something I can’t have. Every day I find some way to go on! I know that writing every day for an hour would help me tremendously with writer’s block, but I also know that I need an element of wildness in my writing. I need to know that writing is something I do because it sets me free. It makes me feel golden with confidence. It gives me the gift of gab. I feel like a god. I feel like an entertainer. So write when you damn well please."

Joe Queenan:"If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find "reality" a bit of a disappointment. People in the 19th century fell in love with "Ivanhoe" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" because they loathed the age they were living through. Women in our own era read "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" and even "The Bridges of Madison County"—a dimwit, hayseed reworking of "Madame Bovary"—because they imagine how much happier they would be if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken, illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach. A blind bigamist nobleman with a ruined castle and an insane, incinerated first wife beats those losers any day of the week. Blind, two-timing noblemen never wear belted shorts."

LogicalDash:"Nobody of any age should have to fend off sexual partners. That such defense is assumed as a part of the cost of adult courtship is suggestive of some more fundamental problem than age difference and its effect on consensuality."

Keith Richards:"I had to invent the job, you know," he said, earlier. "There wasn't a sign in the shop window, saying, "Wanted: Keith Richards."

Caitlin Moran: "As I started to reassess my writing style, I thought about what I liked doing--what gave me satisfaction--and realized the primary one was just... pointing at things. Pointing out things I liked, and showing them to other people--like a mum shouting, "Look! Moo-cows!" as a train rushes past a farm. I liked pointing at things, and I liked being reasonable and polite about stuff. Or silly. Silly was very, very good. No one ever got hurt by silly.
Best of all was being pointedly silly about serious things: politics, repression, bigotry. Too many commentators are quick to accuse their enemies of being evil. It's far, far more effective to point out that they're acting like idiots, instead. I was up for idiot-revealing.
"I am just going to be polite and silly, and point at cool things," I decided. "When I started writing, I would have killed to have one thing to write about. Now, I have three. Politeness and silliness, and pointing. That's enough."

Carolyn Hax:"Unless 15 years’ worth of mail has misled me, no one has ever found love through complaining about the lack of it, and no lonely person has ever felt better for hearing, “You just haven’t found the right person yet.”

Joe Queenan:"People who read an enormous number of books are basically dissatisfied with the way things are going on this planet. And I think, in a way, people read for the same reason that kids play video games ... they like that world better. It works better, it's more exciting, and it usually has a more satisfactory ending."

Dan Savage:"There isn't someone for everyone. Some of us do wind up alone, and that just fucking sucks and sometimes that stings, and you don't know if you're one of those people who's going to wind up alone until you die alone....So you kind of have to live in hope and build a life for yourself that's rewarding and fun, has friends and pleasure in it, whether you're alone or not."

the painkiller:"I will not be tagged, pinned, circled, liked, tweeted, retweeted or numbered."

Steve Jobs:"Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Apple:"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Miss Manners:"Please do not -- repeat, not -- make a hostile approach to knitters. Have you not noticed that they are armed with long, pointy sticks?"

Stephen Tobolowsky:"And of course, nothing is what I figured on in my life. That seems to be a recurring theme."

James Bulls:"When you find yourself walking a true path, you will know it because you will want to walk it no matter the burning Sun, freezing sleet, torrential rain, and treacherous ground. The risks become no less and the journey as always exhausts you, but your desire to brave the challenges never diminishes."

Amy Argetsinger:"Twitter is a disease, plain and simple. It makes people insane. A decade from now I expect the CDC and FDA will be issuing warnings."

Cary Tennis:"You don't have to "move on" either. Not until you're ready. People say, Oh, you should be grateful. They say, Oh, it's time for you to move on. I'm like, What are you, a cop with a nightstick? I'll move on when I'm done playing the blues on my harmonica, thank you very much."

Mark Morford:"It is 2011 and here is what we know: Reality is fluid, fact is malleable, cause and effect completely uncertain. We know what we don't know, but we also know the opposite."

Charlie Jane Anders:"Just remember, if you flinch from your destiny, you'll never achieve your true greatness — you didn't choose to be chosen, but being chosen means you have to choose."

Roger Ebert:"To put it bluntly, I believe the world is patriarchal because men are bigger and stronger than women, and can beat them up."

Myca:"Jesus is not the reason for the season, and there's no way I need to act like he is. Christmas is a stolen tradition. There's no reason we can't steal it back."

Dianna Agron:"I am trying to live my life with a sharpie marker approach. You can’t erase the strokes you’ve made, but each step is much bolder and more deliberate."

John Mayer:"It occurred to me that since the invocation of Twitter, nobody who has participated in it has created any lasting art. And yes! Yours truly is included in that roundup as well. Let me make sure that statement is as absolute and irrevocable as possible by buzzing your tower one more time: no artwork created by someone with a healthy grasp of social media thus far has proven to be anything other than disposable."

Anne Johnson:"Today some stranger sent me an email that said, "You are a nut case." Well, I must admit this never would have occurred to me. Everyone else is a nut case. I'm the sane one. I think."

Carl Mayer:"Whenever I start to feel like my life isn’t where I want it to be, “Cops” is there to put everything into perspective. Yeah, I haven’t made all the right moves over the last 34 years, but I’m not hiding from the police under a kiddie pool, either."

Wish I'd seen this earlier. In honor of, I spotted this (Salon)."Ever since Salon automated its letters, it's been hard to ignore that
the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than
those about men -- sometimes nakedly sexist, sometimes less obviously
so; sometimes sexually and/or personally degrading. But I've never
admitted the toll our letters can sometimes take on women writers at
Salon, myself included, because admitting it would be giving misogynist
losers -- and these are the posters I'm talking about -- power. Still,
I've come to think that denying it gives them another kind of power,
and I'm trying to sort that out by thinking about the Kathy Sierra mess
in all its complexity.

But once I joined Salon I started receiving the creepiest personal
e-mails about my work. Anything I wrote that vaguely defended President
Clinton or criticized his attackers, in particular, would get me a
torrent of badly spelled e-mail, often from Free Republic readers and
posters. There were themes: A significant subset tended to depict me in
a Monica Lewinsky role, often graphically. Like Kathy Sierra, I endured
too many references to "cum" in those e-mails. I'll forgo other details
for the sake of brevity and discretion.But it was hard to know for sure how much had to do with my gender.
David Talbot was regularly attacked by wingnuts as a Clinton
"butt-boy," so it was impossible to say it was all about my being a
woman. It still seems that when a man comes in for abuse online, he's
disproportionately attacked as gay -- and if he is gay, like Andrew
Sullivan, who wrote a column for us for a while, his hate mail at Salon
is likely to be comparable to mine: heavy on sexual imagery and insult,
sometimes bordering on violence. Yuck. I couldn't see into anyone
else's in box to be sure if the abuse I was getting was
disproportionate, but I suspected it was. Mostly I just ignored it.When Salon automated its letters, ideas that had only seen our in boxes
at Salon were suddenly turning up on the site. And I couldn't deny the
pattern: Women came in for the cruelest and most graphic criticism and
taunting. Gary Kamiya
summed it up well in a piece on overall online feedback, noting "an
ugly misogynistic aspect" to the reaction to women writers. One thing I
noticed early on: We all got nicknames. I'm "Joanie," Rebecca Traister
is "Becky," Debra Dickerson is "Debbie" and on and on. There are lots
of comments about our looks and sexuality or ... likability, to avoid
using the f-word, a theme you almost never see even in angry, nasty
threads about male writers. Most common is a sneering undercurrent of
certainty that the woman in question is just plain stupid; it's hard to
believe we have jobs at all. (But then, since a woman is, unbelievably,
the clueless, incompetent boss of Salon, it makes a certain kind of
sense.)

The fact is, I've never experienced the violent threats Sierra has
online -- and I don't think any woman has on Salon -- and so I can't
really judge her reaction. I'd like to think I'd just go on with my
life, but I don't know. And maybe I was a little bit more chastened by
what Sierra experienced because I started my own blog last week, and two days later, I interviewed our former columnist Anne Lamott. We got no violent threats, just 300 letters or so, many of them quite nasty.I don't want to compare that thread to what Sierra suffered; there
were no threats of violence and no particularly sexual insults. But
boy, there were plenty of insults, and most of them had to do with us
as women -- as mothers, as sexual objects, as writers, as professional
women in the world. To boil it down, we're wrinkly old hags (even
though Lamott said my neck looks good! WTF?); we're narcissists and bad
mothers, and worst of all, for writers, we're really bad writers, and
terribly stupid. But mostly we're just bad women. Bad, bad women. And
did I mention ugly and wrinkly?"

"My sense of what can be done to stop specifically misogynistic
bullying depends on what I hinted at in my earlier post: it’s a
broken-windows problem. (Yes, I know the sociologists debunked the
broken-windows hypothesis long ago. I still find it a convenient
analogy.) I don’t think the hateful language or the rape ’shop jobs or
the threats could go nearly as far as they have (and still do) were it
not for a widespread and unchallenged culture on the internet that
insults, demeans, and irrelevantly sexualizes women millions of times
on millions of websites every single day.It’s worse in geekland. It always has been worse in
geekland. There’s a strong (but by no means 1.0) positive correlation
between the strength of a woman’s belief that misogyny on the internet
is a serious problem and the strength of her connections with geekland.
(It’s not just the computer geeks, either, which is why I use the vague
term “geekland.” Gaming of various sorts, comics, science-fiction fandom—same
story. Also, my remarks may extend to homophobia, which is likewise
endemic in geekland, but I welcome refutation from people closer to
that problem than I am.)It’s all over the place—the pr0n jokes, the “I’d hit that” (hit, equating sex to aggression, that,
reducing a human being to a thing), the “I bet she’s hot,” the “I bet
she’s a fat whore,” the “I did your mom” one-offs. Everything about a
woman, any woman, reduces to sex and sexual attractiveness.
Even compliments are invariably phrased in terms of sexual
attractiveness; geekland doesn’t know how else to compliment a woman.All this is deeply ingrained in geekland culture, so deeply that if
your connections to geekland are strong enough, it is inescapable… so
inescapable that perhaps you’re already accustomed to it. Me, I have
never gotten accustomed to it—call me sheltered, but I honestly didn’t
ever run into people who thought and talked that way until I joined
geekland, sometime after graduate school—and so I get angry about it
and people hate and fear my anger, and try to delegitimize itIt’s out of this earth that attacks like the one against Kathy
Sierra grow. I firmly believe this. If you don’t, then click away;
there’s not much point in reading further.I can’t do anything about these particular broken windows. I’ve
proven that the hard way—by trying repeatedly and failing
repeatedly—and believe me, I hate my helplessness. My sense is that
geekland culture only listens to women when they behave like honorary guys,
which means silently accepting the prevailing misogyny (because after
all, the guys do). Long ago, I tried to fix a broken window in my
corner of the blogosphere. I failed, failed abjectly, and I came within
an inch of leaving blogging because of it; if you want the gory
details, hop all the way back to the beginning of my “Grunchy stuff”
category. More recently, I tried to fix a broken window in the code4lib
IRC channel. I failed, failed abjectly, though I hear others have
picked up tools and are perhaps making progress with them.I’m dubious that women can fix these windows on their own, in fact.
It’d be nice, but geekland culture has got a cozy little cycle going:
demean women, then accuse them of overreacting (I’m being kind here;
the accusations are generally much nastier than that) if they protest
it, then demean the protesters, who are after all women, until they are
driven off. Then demean women some more; who will be left to protest?
And who will be left to protest should merely demeaning women escalate
to threatening them? Threatening them sexually? Threatening their lives?No, a Kathy Sierra debacle won’t happen in every community whose
norms allow sex jokes. But I will venture to say that every community
with those norms has driven women out of it, mostly but not always
silently. Argue with me about that. I dare you. I’ve been that woman
too often.But the cycle can be broken. It just has to be broken by
men. And, I believe, it needs to be broken as early as possible in the
cycle, while the norms of a particular community are still forming.
Once they’ve crystallized such that pr0n jokes and “I’d hit that” are
acceptable, the battle is lost. That community is inevitably going to
drive away some woman sometime, and probably a lot of them. Moreover, I have yet to see such a community reform itself.So here is what you do, if you’re a man wanting to help. You say,
“Um, was that supposed to be funny? Because, not laughing here.” You
say, “Hey, could we not use that phrase? I don’t like it.” You say to
the main perpetrators, in IRC whispers or private email or whatever,
“Hey, would you mind toning down the jokes? That kind of talk really
bothers me.”The key here is to express that the demeaning of women bothers you, you personally. Don’t appeal to nebulous higher causes; geekland scoffs at that stuff. Don’t even say
the words “sexist” or “sexism,” much less “feminism,” and avoid “woman”
and “women” whenever you can. If you say “that kind of talk,” trust me,
they’ll know what you mean; whereas if you invoke the loaded words, they’ll shut down like a portcullis before an invading army.And don’t say that you want the talk to stop because you want a
comfortable environment for women, or even for a specific woman (your
significant other, your sister, your daughter, your boss, your
employee). Geekland doesn’t care. You can’t even say that you want more
women to join the community. Some geeks will openly say “Why?” (Or,
less openly, they will say that women aren’t there because they don’t
want to be—without answering the question begged—or aren’t smart enough
or good enough or “tough enough” to be. The last-mentioned, of course,
is code for “honorary guy.”) The rest will simply assume that you want women for sex, because that’s all that women are for in geekland.In fact, don’t get drawn into discussing why sexist talk
irks you; doing so has probably been my major mistake. Geekland is
very, very good at attacking feminist arguments, and dismissing and
besieging the arguers. If they ask you why you’re bothered, just ask
“Shouldn’t I be? Doesn’t it bother you? Uh, isn’t it wrong?” and like
that—let them defend. (They will, don’t mistake me. But at least they have to.)I reiterate: You must say that “that kind of talk” bothers you
personally, and you must not get drawn into fruitless arguments about
why you are bothered. That’s the only thing that breaks the cycle.Sounds easy. Isn’t. It’s no good to do this in safe spaces, like the
comment section of a female (much less feminist) blogger. You have to
do it in spaces where you will not feel welcome or possibly
even safe in saying it. And you will have to repeat yourself until you
are blue in the face, this happens so often. Welcome to my world.You will be told you’re overreacting. You will be told nobody means
any harm. You will be ordered to lay off. You will be asked why you
care, why you don’t have anything more important to worry about, why
you’re ruining the great social environment. You will be shunned. You
will be hassled. You may even be told to get the hell out. You will be
called a feminazi, very possibly to your face. You will be told you’re
pussywhipped, because in geekland, women are properly subordinate to
men and nobody better damn well forget it. You will even be called a
pussy or a cunt, because in geekland, nothing is worse than being compared to a woman, and her genitalia specifically.Not easy. Not easy at all. It will take astonishing amounts of
courage and persistence, in fact. But aside from getting in early and
setting norms up front, nothing else works that I’ve ever seen. Think
you’ve got the guts? Step up and prove it. Sing with the chorus."

"But I
suspect that what appears to be a kind of loophole in Eeyore’s Law – which states that if your life can suck, it will suck – is not exactly a get-out-of-jail-free card. This is because you are not the only force at work in the world, and so your power to achieve precisely what you want is necessarily limited by what others want. After all, the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates may all envision themselves as leader of the free world, but only one of them is going to end up taking the oath of office.I don’t
mean to dismiss positive thinking out of hand; I perform my new and full moon rituals, after all. But it seems obvious
that what we want is not always exactly what we’ll get – sometimes, it won’t even be close. And I’ll take this a
step further: Sometimes, maybe we shouldn’t get exactly what we want. I shudder to think what would have happened had I married the man with whom my 25-year-old self was so desperately infatuated. Our ability to visualize something and to pursue it with positive thoughts and actions is not only no guarantee that we’ll get it – it’s not even a guarantee that it’s something worth pursuing."